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ELTL users…
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Do you find that ELTL is complete, or do you feel the need to supplement?
I bought ELTL to use with my 4th and 2nd grader next year and I was just curious if I needed to add anything else for spelling instruction? Other than that, it looks pretty good and I’m excited to give it a try.
Yes, you will need something else for spelling. I am so pleased, though, with what it does cover: grammar, poetry, picture study, narration, copywork, and more!
What would you recommend for Spelling? And on the other subjects that it does cover, did you feel it is complete, or do I need to add anything in for grammar? And how is the picture study? Will adding in SCM Picture Portfolios be overkill?
ELTL includes copywork and dictation for spelling. That is plenty of spelling in a CM education. If you choose to add a separate program, R&S Spelling is very popular, as is Spelling Workout. We personally add SCM’s Spelling Wisdom starting in 4th grade. I leave out the dictation lessons in ELTL, since it’s being covered through SW.
It’s a very complete grammar program! I don’t think anything is needed there. I’m thinking about having my 9th grader run through Our Mother Tongue for a grammar overview, but I’m not sure she even needs that!
Picture studies are very simple. You can combine your DC into the same picture set. If you want to use SCM’s picture study, I’d sub out the ELTL pictures so you are only using one set of pictures (or you could do a combination by using SCM one term and ELTL for another).
I like the look of both R&S and SCM for spelling so thank you for the recommendations. May I ask why you decided to add in SW? I’m not sure what I want to do yet.
I’ve had so many people recommend the picture studies through SCM so I truly don’t want to miss out on those. I like your recommendation of doing one one term and the other the following term. So that’s probably what I’ll end up doing.
And what about writing? My oldest is 9 (4th grade) so I’m wondering if this is the year to start something formal for her. I purchased Story Starters used awhile ago and honestly haven’t really looked through it, but I’m wondering if it would be a good choice to start with.
Sorry for all the questions. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how Charlotte Mason taught LA! 🙂
I have used Reading Lessons Through Literature (from the same author) to teach my 1st grader to read, and I plan to continue through all the levels to work on spelling. We will add ELTL next year for 2nd grade and I am going to use the picture study lessons from his level for the family. He is my oldest, so each year we will use the three artists in his current level of ELTL, and possibly add in others.
We’d already been using SW previously, so I just replaced the ELTL dictation passages with SW’s passages. The main reason I prefer SW is that the SW passages are much richer, where ELTL are pulled from the literature passages, so they are often just dialog from the reading. SW uses interesting quotes and passages from great literature selections. Sonya includes the 6,000 most frequently used words in these passages as well, which I think is a great idea.
For writing, I’ll be adding Memoria Press’s Classical Composition for the coming year for my oldest 3 (4th grade and up). I’m not sure how CM friendly the program is, but it’s the route my DC are taking. lol
Some of my DC are using R&S Spelling for the coming year. I haven’t used a formal spelling program in years, so it will probably be the first thing to go if something needs to be dropped.
Just bumping this with a question… I will be starting Level 3 and 5 of ELTL for my 4th and 7th grader. I am scared to death to make the transition since we have always used a traditional program.
My questions is, would it be overkill to have my 7th grader complete ELTL 5 and Writing With Skill. She is doing an online class with the Well Trained Mind Academy. My main goals for my 7th grader is to really work on reading comprehension and writing. She has always done very well in her grammar program, but I don’t see a ton of her grammar transferring over. I think we NEED a heavy writing year. However, I don’t want to overwhelm her, but really want to see improvement in the writing department.
There does seem to be quite a bit of writing in ELTL. Especially with the dictations and commonplace book assignments. It will be completely different than what she is used to! Any advice or insight is welcome.
If it’s too much, you can always cut back on the dictation or copywork. ELTL 5 has a written narration scheduled every other week, so there isn’t a huge amount of writing. We replaced the dictation for Spelling Wisdom’s dictation lessons, which we did twice a week. For copywork, we set a timer, so they’d spend 5 minutes 2-3 times per week. I usually assigned her something to write, so she wasn’t spending too long looking for passages to copy. Usually it was a Bible passage or poem we were currently memorizing.
My advice would be to pick and choose what to cover from ELTL. You can do as much or as little of the lesson as you’d like. We didn’t get to every last poem, used a different picture study resource, and didn’t always read the folk tale. On busy days, we often just did the grammar portion and exercises.
How long is the writing class? Is it just for a semester or the whole year? If it’s just a semester long, you could add in ELTL later on, maybe having her start the literature readings earlier. If she’s writing our her WWS assignments by hand, I would think you could skip the copywork altogether, and just have her write out quotes in a commonplace book as she’s interested.
Thank you Holly! Her writing class is for a full year. She will be typing her assignments to send in to her instructor. All the grading will be done for me. So Writing With Skill will not add much physical writing at all.
Do you have your child do all of the commonplace assignments as written. This part of ELTL will be very new to her. I truly like the idea of it though.
I knew if I had her choose her own commonplace entries, she’d spend all her time looking for the perfect verse/passage to add. So I assigned her passages for copywork, instead of having her find her own passages…although I have encouraged her to add her own as she comes across them. Unfortunately, I don’t think she’s added any on her own.
We pretty much just skipped the dictation & copywork assignments as written and just worked on them as they came up in our weekly schedule.
Thank you so much for the advice Holly! I truly appreciate it. I guess I will just have to get started on it and then tweet it for my kiddo’s.
Oh… one other question.. I notice that you said that you will be using Classical Composition this year. Will you be adding this to ELTL?
Now if I can just get over my fear of doing LA the traditional way, I would be set!
No, they won’t be doing ELTL this year. My oldest two (going into 9th and 6th grades) have picked up the grammar really well, so we just be reviewing a few things in the grammar book, Our Mother Tongue, as they come up in our Latin lessons. We’ll be covering literature as a family this year, and I had a difficult time fitting in ELTL for my other DC on top of everything else. My middle two DC will most likely use ELTL for the following year (2017-18) for 2nd & 5th grades.
ELTL is a great program, and I feel like we accomplished much more than we would have done with a textbook approach. You have nothing to fear! 🙂
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